We See The Footage From Ascension, Just As The Characters Do Every Year

Every year the crew of Ascension watch an old black-and-white film, from a German rocket scientist based on Von Braun, announcing the Ascension project.

And now the audience at San Diego Comic-Con saw it too.

"So the time has come for mankind to take longer strides, we must move further down the line, we must reach for the stars" and making an appeal for the survival of the arms race, the space race and the human race. A new Syfy series about a secret space programme from the sixties that launched a trip across the stars, and now we meet the remaining crew and their children fifty years on.

Cue David Bowie.

Early footage showed Kennedy's space speech laid over the planned fifty year space voyage from the crew, going through their own crises laid against footage from the sixties.

Mad Men in space would be a decent enough hook, but more the descendants of the Mad Men if they'd kept to the same cultural and social mores of the day, with the assassination of JFK, without the loss of Vietnam, without Watergate or the civil rights movement.

Amid that is a piece of social enlightment, a multi-ethnic cast (admittedly not on stage at the show) based on the understanding that genetic diversity was a good and necessary thing for human survival. How their world is a closed system with glow in the dark fish providing lighting.